We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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My friend Adriana Cronin has already been indirectly responsible for an interesting posting here a few weeks back (about that computer game which is having “real world” economic impact), which Perry de Havilland actually did the posting of. Adriana is ‘Something in the City’, as we in London say of mysteriously rich and powerful or heading-that-way financial folks, and was also one of the normal women featured in the blog bash photos. (Her attendance fee is, I understand, in the post.) She will be joining Team Samizdata officially Real Soon Now.
Meanwhile, Adriana has emailed me about two items of libertarian interest. One is about Reagan and can keep a day or two until she is blog-connected. The other is more topical, and concerns the fact that the Libertarian Party of Illinois have, it would appear, been spamming little old ladies with anti-gun-control propaganda.
You can take this complaint from a British media source two ways. One: the Libertarian Party of Illinois are making enemies needlessly among the normals with their bad netiquette. (This is Adriana’s take on it.) Or two: the normals are by definition idiots about gun control who deserve (a) to be mugged every day and twice on Sunday, and (b) all the anti-gun-control propaganda our side can spam at them, and that these Illinois guys are damn good! (Adriana says I am wrong even to suggest that. Spam is evil evil evil, even if you are God spamming Satan. What can I say? She knows all this 21st century stuff a lot better than I ever will.)
The British government feels it no longer even has to hide the fact it wishes to be the centre of a vast spider web of surveillance. Gone are the days of ‘no comment’ regarding Echelon and Carnivore. Now the state is demanding the ability to control all communications between British scientists and foreign colleagues on pretty much any subject the state deems appropriate.
The situation is little better in the USA and as the editorial in the latest print edition of New Scientist aptly puts it:
The government there is withdrawing thousands of technical papers that amount to cookbooks for chemical and biological weapons. It has also asked journal editors to leave out details from papers that would be essential for anyone replicating the work. This undermines the whole notion of ensuring that research results can be checked by others. It also raises a paradox: terrorists, it seems, are deemed smart enough to understand arcane science, but too dumb to fill in the gaps in research papers
The deadening effect this will all have on a vast swathe of scientific progress is not hard imagine. Inevitably some types of research will just migrate to places where the state does not impede its development resulting in more, not less, diffusion of critical knowledge and technologies. Rather than a narrowly targeted moderation of clearly weaponised technologies, the state has elected to implement an Orwellian oversight on all technical discussions on subjects to be determined by semi-qualified bureaucrats who will always have a presumption of the legitimacy of intervention. A disappointing response but hardly a unexpected one to someone such as myself who assumes the worst of states and is rarely surprised.
When The State watches you,
dare to stare back
I have heard news on the radio that vile mass murderer from Bosnia i Herzegovina Radovan Karadzic is surrounded by troops trying to arrest him. I hope they do not take him alive. I also hope he is feeling some of what so many other people felt when they realised that armed man more powerful than themselves were surrounding where they lived.
Splendid news!
We received an e-mail from Kevin Connors on the issue of the term ‘liberal’
I believe David’s piece on the label “liberal” is quite ill-advised. I have a hard enough time trying to explain libertarianism to people and differentiate it from conservatism without swimming against the tide on an issue of semantics.
However I must disagree with Kevin. I think this is a useful point to raise for several reasons.
It is useful to put the evolution of the term into historical perspective, as Tom Burroughes has done, in order to understand the evolutionary process by which a term can come to mean the opposite of its original meaning, at least in the USA and to an extent the UK.
It is also useful to note that in the process of defining a word, it forces people to contrast it against opposing concepts and thus discover synonyms and antonyms. It is very helpful indeed to be able to point out that liberal is just a synonym for socialist and that it is mostly because ‘socialist’ has such negative connotations in the USA that members of the Democratic party use the term liberal. Thus a little discursive musing on the term ‘liberal’ makes that point rather hard to avoid. There is little daylight between modern ‘democratic socialists’ in Europe, Liberal Democrats in the UK and Democrats in the USA: they are just the modern faces of socialism.
Pointing this out is far from ill-advised. Many in the UK who vote for the ‘Liberal Democrats’ do so because of quaint ideas that they are the ‘middle way’, whereas the truth is that they are further to the socialist left than the Labour Party. In the USA many who would sooner use the star-spangled banner as a doormat than vote ‘Socialist’ nevertheless vote ‘Democrat’.
All we are doing is trying to introduce a little coherence into the political taxonomy!
Bravo David Carr! I must say I agree that the word liberal, often used as a term of abuse across the big ditch, needs to be rescued. To my mind, the term connotes open-mindedness, freedom, skepticism about overweening plans for the betterment of mankind, endorsement of the free market and respect for privacy. Thanks to Roosevelt’s New Deal, and the “reforms” of the British Asquith government before the First World War, however, it has taken on an altogether more interventionist meaning since then, both in the U.S. and to a lesser extent, in the U.K. David is quite right to note, too, that liberal means something closer to what I hope it does mean when used in Continental Europe.
I think this issue of terminology matters because of the need by genuine liberals to distinguish themselves from conservatives, who may buy the economic side of liberalism but reject the social/cultural part, such as Britain’s Conservative Party. Vive la liberte!
Tom Burroughes (tom.burroughes@reuters.com)
Something has been bothering me for a while now and I regret to have to say that the source of my concern emanates from across the pond. Wonder what it is? Well, it’s the use of the word ‘Liberal’ when referring to someone of the leftist persuasion which is nothing less than a complete inversion of the term.
It gives me pleasure, therefore, to link to a campaign being undertaken by Bureaucrash, a group of seriously well dug-in and commited US student capitalist activists (and it feels so good to be able to type those words in earnest).
“Here in the birthplace of modern freedom, liberalism has come to identify a view that favors the use of force — force exercised by the bureaucratic state — to achieve supposedly noble ideals.”
I could not have put it better. Just what happened to the word? From 18th Century up until around the 1960’s ‘Libertarianism’ in this country was called ‘Liberalism’. It denoted support for free trade, limited government, low taxes and property rights. But these trends being what they are, Britain has been influenced by the US terminology and now the word denotes, regulation, nanny state, high taxes and hate speech laws. The latter is not ‘liberalism’ it is ‘socialism’. The very word ‘Libertarian’ was conceived as a means of distinguishing us from them.
You can test this theory if you ever go to Continental Europe where the term ‘Liberal’ has retained its original meaning. Just go up to any European socialist and tell him/her that you are a ‘liberal’. Note how their faces swifty transform from the customary rictus of hate to a rictus of seething hate shot through with horror.
I don’t know if was an underhand tactic by the left, a cruel happenstance of fate or mere sloppiness that allowed our political foes in the Anglosphere to grab our cloak and wrap it around their own bodies but it is way past time that we grabbed it back.
So I support the Bureaucrash campaign and, whilst I know it will stick in many a craw, I invoke all my fellow Capitalists, Libertarians and, yes, even you Conservatives to join in and declare; “Say it once, say it loud, I’m a Liberal and I’m proud!!”
Perry is doubtless on to something in his post below. Stephanie Dopeout or Stuffy Dupont or whatever the bit of fluff mishandling Brian Linse’s office calls herself is doubtless miffed at not being invited to the Bash. I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s also more than a tad jealous that Brian is enjoying the company of other women, especially intelligent ones that don’t have a price tag dangling in their cleavage. Has anyone else noticed how familiar Stephanie is with that whole “babe for cash” routine?
Here’s a tip, Stephanie. Copy Brian’s Roladex (that’s a phone number index, not a watch) while you have the chance. Stockholm Syndrome aside, we at Team Samizdata can be persuasive, verrry, verrry persuasive, and I would not be at all suprised if, upon his return, Brian sends you back to the low budget temporary help office where he found you. If you’re lucky, he’ll even give you a map so you don’t get lost again.
One more thing. Brian can’t afford a PETA lawsuit, so go easy on the hamsters. Remember: The water goes in the bottle. The food goes in the bowl.
Like many who walk the cutting edge, I have friends in the cryonics field and have my little Alcor freezer dogtag hanging about my neck. Well, to be honest, it’s void at the moment as entrepreneuring in Belfast is a better way to end up in the poor house than the cryostat but that is another story. A lot of stories actually.
Needless to say, I found this bit of eurofascism both troubling and astounding:
“A French couple who were frozen when they died in the hope that medical advances would one day revive them are facing a thaw at the hands of local authorities,” the BBC reports. When Monique Martinot died in 1984, her husband, Raymond, put her on ice. Last week he died, and his son stuck him in the same fridge. “What has been done is outlawed in France,” a prosecutor tells the BBC. “In this country, bodies must either be cremated or buried.”
The BBC notes that “many European countries have legislation in place restricting the preservation of dead bodies in such a way.”
In my book the prosecutor will be guilty of a double, premeditated homicide if he goes through with this. Some of you are now thinking: “Huh? But they’re already dead!”
To paraphrase a former American president (and beat you with a dead cliche): it depends on what you mean by “dead”. Cryonics exists on the premise that so long as the brain and memories are intact, a technology will exist at some arbitrary time in the future capable of both undoing the cause of death and repairing the damage caused by freezing. I think most would agree there is at least a possibility of resuscitation.
What we have here are Schroedinger’s People, neither alive nor dead, suspended in a quantum world of chance. So our French prosecutor will be a quantum murderer if he opens the box. He will intentionally kill two people and extinguish their chance to once again walk a Riviera beach side by side.
Note: I was led to this story by the Opinion Journal e-mail news.
The tasks of the party are … to be cautious and not allow our country to be drawn into conflicts by warmongers who are accustomed to have others pull the chestnuts out of the fire for them.”
-J V Stalin.
[It was said at his speech to the 8th Congress of the Communist Party on 6 Jan 1941, some six months before the Germans invaded.]
Stephanie DuPont has suggested that the female guests at the British Blogger Bash were ‘paid escorts’. Two were computer programers at the top end of their professions, one was a manager with the English National Opera, one was a TV producer and one runs a hotel and a small data services operation.
Stephanie is obviously just jealous she was not invited to the bash, or maybe she is looking for a spanking to relieve the tedium of being Brian Linse’s gopher. Yes, she strikes me as the kinky type, that must be it.
At the Brit Blogger Bash: elegant, articulate and easy on the eyes
Rob Smith writes in with an view of the stupidity that transcends mere national borders.
David Carr preaches to a deaf, dumb and blind audience when he presents the gospel truth about the necessity of private gun ownership in a free and peaceful country. As an American, I have witnessed countless assaults on my Second Amendment Constitutional rights by anti-gun fanatics who are totally convinced that guns themselves are evil. No logical argument, no perfect example and no amount of evidence will ever dissuade these people from believing that they are saintly and correct. They hate guns, they fear guns and that’s all they need to know.
What is happening now in Great Britain happened in Chicago, Washington, DC, and every other American city that banned gun ownership by private citizens. Murder rates doubled. Burglaries skyrocketed. Crime ran rampant. But the people who banned the guns don’t see that their actions caused the problem. No, they attack the problem they created by demanding more gun laws.
I reside in the great state of Georgia, where the town of Kennesaw made national news in 1982 by passing a law requiring every head of household to own a firearm. (Okay– a lot of that was a political stunt pulled by the mayor after Morton Grove, Illinois made national headlines by banning private handgun ownership. Morton Grove didn’t see an increase in crime, but 80% of the people in Morton Grove didn’t turn in their guns, either.) When they heard that Kennesaw was about to REQUIRE gun ownership, news reporters and anti-gun hand-wringers immediately left Morton Grove and descended on Kennesaw, where they all predicted a New Dodge City, with shoot-outs on the streets and gutters running red with blood if the law passed.
It passed. From 1981 to 1985, violent crime dropped 71% in Kennesaw. Burglaries dropped 65%. Between 1981 and 1993, the population of Kennesaw doubled and burglaries dropped 16%. Nobody reports the success of the law because the results run contrary to “conventional wisdom” about how private citizens behave when they own guns and how criminals react to that fact.
I have heard that the definition of a fool is someone who repeats a mistake, hoping for a different result the next time. Anti-gun fanatics are fools. The deaf dumb and blind never learn.
Rob Smith
I was aware Donald Rumsfeld was in the Pentagon at the time the Al Qaeda kamikazi’s struck, but I did not realize he had experienced the full glories of middle eastern hospitality. He said the following in an interview with Sir John Keegan of the Telegraph, who had shared some of those same “glorious” times in Beirut:
DONALD RUMSFELD: The fellow who finally got me out of there was Brigadier General Carl Steiner, who was then head of our special forces and was travelling with me for a period.
He is quite well known today as a terrific person. But we ended up, we’d been trapped in there for three or four days where they were shelling the house we were in. And we got in the car and there was all this crazy driving. My wife took some Dramamine. She was in there with me that whole time.
We ended up in your Embassy on those wooden pews that are in the front, where all the people come in to get visas? And she had taken two or three Dramamine and fell completely asleep in a flak jacket. And I can still picture her, just out cold from the Dramamine, waiting for a helicopter to come in, and the only place we could go was your Embassy, before we got out of there.
Secretary Rumsfeld’s CV for his current job is even better than I had ever imagined. No wonder he understands there is no safety in any form of engagement with al Qaeda and their ilk that does not leave them laid in rows on the ground.
The interview is in the online Telegraph and well worth a read.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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